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The Roosevelt Administration created the PWA (Public Works Administration) in the spring of 1933 to promote economic recovery by funding local construction projects. The central concept was to put unemployed men to work, who would then spend their wages to buy goods and services. This was called "priming the pump." Unlike so-called work relief projects, such as the WPA, workers did not need to come from the welfare rolls. PWA projects also tended to be more "capital intensive" (using more machinery and less labor) and they required local funding in addition to federal grants. For all these reasons PWA projects were slow to start and often were rejected by local governments. In this article, Northfield, Massachusetts rejects a federal grant for school construction, for example.